A Former Soldier Explains Why Trump Was Wrong About the Troops

At a rally this week, Donald Trump suggested that U.S. soldiers in Iraq stole reconstruction money.

PHOTOGRAPH BY JONATHAN DRAKE / REUTERS

On Tuesday, Donald Trump held a rally in Greensboro, North Carolina. The stump speech was of the usual fare—“Crooked Hillary,” the border wall, the lyrics to Al Wilson’s “The Snake.” Some of the invective was framed around the tragic events in Orlando last weekend, but for the most part Trump stuck to his usual themes. Then, while discussing the war in Iraq, Trump remarked, “How about bringing baskets of money, millions of millions of dollars, and handing it out? I wanna know, who are the soldiers that had that job? Because I think they’re living very well right now, whoever they may be.”

Numb as I have admittedly become to Trump’s usual rhetoric, it was tough not to take offense at the suggestion that soldiers stole reconstruction money. I served in Iraq and Afghanistan, and, among other duties, I was responsible for handing out those “baskets of money” under the Commander’s Emergency Response Program, also known as CERP. The program started out using money seized from Saddam Hussein’s coffers, but it later became federally funded and was overseen by Congress. The money was invested in schools, public roads, and medical clinics. The marines I fought alongside navigated ambushes and I.E.D.s—and, on several occasions, were wounded and killed—trying to secure the reconstruction programs this money supported. Nobody got rich. The average rank among us was lance corporal. The average annual base pay was sixteen thousand eight hundred and eighty-four dollars.

In 2008, while deployed as a special operator in western Afghanistan, I led a team of fifteen marines and nearly seven hundred Afghan commandos stationed on a remote firebase near the Iranian border. We were almost entirely reliant on an operational fund, something akin to CERP. We used these funds to buy our food and fuel and to hire local Afghan tribesmen to provide base security. Hundreds of thousands of dollars passed through our hands. Our position was in no way unique. Every special-operations team in Afghanistan managed the same kinds of funds. Once, when security in the village just outside our gate became a problem, one of the marines I worked with negotiated a deal with the local village elders to use our operational fund to convert an abandoned Olympic-size, Soviet-era swimming pool into a reservoir to irrigate several acres of parched fields. Within a few weeks, those fields were ready for planting, and the threat to our base had disappeared.

Two and a half million American men and women have served in Iraq and Afghanistan. According to the Center for Public Integrity, some hundred and fifteen military personnel since 2005 have been convicted of committing theft, bribery, or contract-rigging crimes, involving a total of fifty-two million dollars. This is a disappointing fact, but it does not cancel out the ingenuity shown by the soldiers, many of them only in their twenties, who have ethically managed budgets equivalent to that of a small town or medium-sized business. Many of these service members have returned to the U.S. and struggled to find jobs. A former Navy SEAL I know, for example, once applied for a managerial position at Home Depot. As a SEAL, he had been responsible for tens of thousands of dollars. But the hiring officer told him that he couldn’t see any relevant managerial experience on his résumé. He didn’t get the job.

It would have been nice if Trump had used the bully pulpit in Greensboro to point out how programs like CERP, in fact, give veterans experience managing significant amounts of money in complex situations, and how that experience is directly transferrable to the job market. Unfortunately, he didn’t. The campaign’s only follow-up to Trump’s remarks came from his surrogate Hope Hicks. She attempted to clarify his comments Wednesday morning, on NBC News. “Mr. Trump was referring to Iraqi soldiers,” Hicks said. You can watch the the video and make up your own mind.

One of the most ingenious projects I ever saw operational funds used for was on that same firebase in Afghanistan. It was another swimming pool, this one built by the U.S. Army Special Forces team that we replaced. The second pool was much smaller than the Soviet one—really, it was just a large concrete hole in the ground. It was tucked into the back corner of the firebase, and sometimes, on particularly hot days, you could take a dip in the grimy yet cool waters. When I first arrived at the base, I asked the sergeant who was showing me around what the deal was with this second swimming pool.

“It ain’t a pool, sir,” he said. “It’s a septic flushing system.”

He then explained how both our firebase and the adjacent village were built over an old sewer system, constructed by the Soviets. Often, the sewer clogged up. In the past, the villagers had to wait for rain to unclog it, and the blockage sometimes tainted the local water supply. The sergeant who was showing me around had come up with the idea of the flushing system. At first, I was skeptical. It seemed like a scam. Then, a couple of weeks later, the scent of sewage began to waft up from the ground on both our firebase and in the village beyond. Clutching our shirts to our noses, we pulled the drain on the swimming pool, putting the septic flushing system to work. There was a long, nasal slurping sound as the water rushed underground. Within a few minutes, the air was clear. The fetid smell that had tormented us was gone.

Elliot Ackerman is a writer based in Istanbul. He is the author of the novel “Green on Blue.”